The Meanings Of Magic - Magic, Ritual, And Witchcraft

The Meanings of Magic Michael D. Bailey

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, Volume 1, Number 1, Summer 2006, pp. 1-23(Article)

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The Meanings of Magic

M I C H A E L D . B A I L E YIowa State University

The establishment of a new journal titled Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft begsthe question: what do these words mean? In what sense do they comprise auseful academic category or field of inquiry? The history of magic and thecultural functions it has played and continues to play in many societies havebeen a focus of scholarship for well over one hundred years. Grand anthropo-logical and sociological theories developed mostly in the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries offer clear structures, and the classic definitions ofEdward Burnett Taylor, James Frazer, Emile Durkheim, and others still rever-berate through much scholarly work on this topic. While aspects of thesetheories remain useful, more recent studies have tended to take a much nar-rower approach, examining the specific forms that magic, magical rites, orwitchcraft assume and the issues they create in particular periods and withinparticular societies. This has led to laudable focus and precision, yet it hasalso stifled communication between scholars working in different periods,regions, or disciplines. This journal is intended to promote such communica-tion, and to provide a forum in which issues common to the study of magicin all contexts can be raised. Therefore, it will prove useful at the outset topresent some thoughts about the significance of magic as a category, aboutthe meanings it has carried and the approaches it has evoked, about some ofthe ways in which the study of magic might be advanced, and about someof the areas to which such further study might contribute.

Scholars in many fields recognize magic as an important topic. In its rites,rituals, taboos, and attendant beliefs, magic might be said to comprise, or atleast describe, a system for comprehending the entire world. It provides ameans for navigating among the varied forces that comprise and shape mate-rial creation, and promises its practitioners methods of controlling or at least

My thanks to Sara Gregg, William Monter, Edward Peters, Janelle Stanley, andMatthew Stanley, each of whom agreed to act as a reader for this article, and whogreatly improved both its content and style.

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (Summer 2006)Copyright � 2006 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.

2 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft �Summer 2006

affecting those forces. In certain circumstances, magicians claim that theirrites can elevate them to a higher state of consciousness, allowing them toperceive occult aspects of nature or enter into communion with preternaturalor supernatural entities. Not surprisingly, magic has often been linked toother expansive systems for understanding, interacting with, and influencingthe whole of creation, namely, religion and science.1 As part of such a power-ful triad, magic appears central to human culture, and the study of the formsof magic that are accepted, practiced, or condemned in any society is neces-sary for a full understanding of that society.

Yet magic is a profoundly unstable category. In most circumstances it hastypically been defined by authorities of various sorts (religious, legal, intellec-tual) who are either opposed to or at least condescending toward the practicesand beliefs they see it entailing. These authoritative definitions have varieddramatically across time and between cultures. Yet the instability runs deeper,for even within a given society not all people who engage in magic willnecessarily see their actions as part of a single coherent system, or accept all(or indeed any) other elements of that system. A remarkable aspect of magicis the degree to which many people in various social and historical contextshave engaged in acts that their culture as a whole, or at least certain culturalauthorities, would categorize as magical without considering themselves tobe performing magic. This seems especially true of simple spells or othercommon rites or superstitions that people may hold or practice without anysystematic coherence.2 This very instability, however, evident in so manycontexts, makes magic a rich field of study and can even become a kind ofunifying focus.

1. Famously in classic works of anthropology and sociology by Edward BurnettTylor, James Frazer, Emile Durkheim, and Bronislaw Malinowski (on each of whommore below); more recently, for example, in Jacob Neusner, Ernest S. Frerichs, andPaul Virgil McCracken Flesher, eds., Religion, Science, and Magic: In Concert and inConflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Magic,Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1990); Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

2. Regarding medieval Europe, for example, Richard Kieckhefer’s discussion ofthe broad ‘‘common tradition of medieval magic’’ (Kieckhefer, Magic in the MiddleAges [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], 56–94) is framed by questionsof whether contemporary practitioners regarded their actions as magical. Of course,in the absence of strict authoritative enforcement, people may also become quiteidiosyncratic in the religious rites they observe or beliefs they express. Similarly, manypeople accept or dismiss various aspects of science without great concern for howtheir choices may or may not relate to some overall system of scientific thought.

3Bailey � The Meaning of Magic

Recognizing the value of present methodologies that stress specificity andcontingency, scholars should use their mutual interest in those contingenciesto direct their conversations toward one another, to identify and comparevarious meanings of magic across human history and cultures. Beyond suchbasic comparativism, there are other areas in which the category of magic,broadly conceived but always with an understanding of its inherent con-structedness, can provide a useful scholarly focus. Conceptualizations of mo-dernity can be approached through the study of magic, for example, andmagical rituals can offer insight into specific ways in which objects andhuman bodies become inscribed with meaning and power. Whatever ap-proach is taken, the goal should not be to resolve the complexity of magic,but to draw out of that complexity new avenues of exploration and discus-sion, and to enliven time-honored approaches to this subject with new en-ergy and new horizons of inquiry.

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Modern scholarship on magic has produced a number of overarching theoriesand definitions, and these have typically framed magic in relation to, or morefrequently in distinction from, religion and science. The tendency towardsweeping theoretical definitions was most pronounced in the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries, when European and American social scientistsbestrode the world like so many Aristotles, confidently categorizing all theybeheld. Sociologists and anthropologists in particular advanced a number ofgeneral categorizations that could serve to distinguish magic from religion orscience—but mainly from religion, as the distinction between magic and sci-ence appeared somewhat more self-evident in that period. One basic distinc-tion, most commonly associated with James Frazier, held that magic typicallysought to coerce or command spiritual forces while religion aimed to suppli-cate their aid. As Frazer wrote, the magician (like the scientist) assumed thatcertain actions properly performed would always produce identical results.Religion, on the other hand, emphasized the ‘‘propitiation and conciliation’’of higher powers. Priests might hope for certain results, and beseech the godsfor them, but they could not expect their prayers always to be answered.3

Another essential distinction, associated with Emile Durkheim, posited thatmagic consisted primarily of private acts carried out for individual gain, whilereligion was essentially communal. Related to this was the definition ad-

3. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd ed., 12 vols. (Lon-don: Macmillan, 1913–20), 1:220–22; or see the abridged version of The GoldenBough (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 48–51.


vanced by Bronislaw Malinowski that magical practices always aimed toachieve specific and immediately tangible effects, while religious rites wereends in themselves, their main purpose being the devotion and grace theyfostered in their faithful practitioners and the broad understanding of theuniverse they promoted.4 Marcel Mauss, Durkheim’s nephew and pupil, ar-gued that scholars should ignore the purported purpose of rites and focusinstead on the social context of their performance. Magic, for him, was pri-vate, secret, mysterious, and above all prohibited, while religion consisted ofrites publicly acknowledged and approved.5

None of these definitions, or others like them, have proven entirely suffi-cient for all circumstances and contexts. Many religions assert that certain oftheir rites may produce definite ends seemingly automatically, such as the exopere operato (by virtue of the operation itself ) functioning of Catholic sacra-ments. Such rites can appear to coerce or compel divine power to somespecific action in ‘‘magical’’ ways. Religious rites may also have very specificends as their goal, while the purposes of some magical operations (that is,operations deemed magical rather than religious) can be quite expansive, in-tended to promote an elevated state of mind or enhanced level of understand-ing or perception in those who perform them. Durkheim himself admittedthat many religious devotions could be entirely private, although he consid-ered these only a limited aspect of some religions, and not a defining featureof ‘‘religion’’ as a category.6 Similarly throughout history, many rites consid-ered by outside observers or even by their participants to be magical havebeen and continue to be communal in nature. The most obvious currentexample would be the communal rites of Wiccans.7 Mauss, by focusing onsocial context and communal approval or approbation of various rituals, of-fers useful tools. Ultimately, however, he maintains an essentially Durkhei-mian view that magic is private while religion is public and communal, andhe also advances the notion that magic seeks immediate and practical results,while religion is more abstract in its general moral goals.8

4. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (NewYork: Free Press, 1995), 39–44. Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion and OtherEssays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948), 67–69.

5. Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brain (1972; reprint Londonand New York: Routledge, 2002), 22–30.

6. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 41.7. For a personal yet scholarly introduction to such a rite, see Nikki Bado-Fralick,

Coming to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation Ritual (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2005).

8. In this he links magic to science and technology, rather than to religion, in waysnot entirely dissimilar to Frazer: Mauss, General Theory, 174–78.


While certain scholars continue to engage with general theoretical defini-tions of magic, and some perhaps even still seek to produce them, for themost part attempts at overarching systematization have given way to carefulattention to particular contexts. Such movement has been evident across thehumanities and social sciences, and this broad trend has shaped the study ofmagic as well. Academics in many disciplines now focus on historically andculturally specific understandings of magic, seeking to clarify not how wemight distinguish between magic and religion, or between magic and science,but rather how a given society drew these or other distinctions at some par-ticular moment.9 A key aspect of such scholarship usually involves a carefulexamination of the words and concepts used to designate various magicalactions, both by contemporaries and by modern scholars.10 This specificity,both laudable and necessary, has contributed to the dwindling of much theo-retical or comparative work on topics captured under the broad rubric ofmagic (one particular avenue for theorizing about magical beliefs and prac-tices—a mode of theorization grounded in historical specificity—has re-mained open, and will be discussed later in this essay). Moreover, this morefocused, case-specific approach can be seen to call into question the legiti-macy of magic as a universal category. Yet even in this scholarly climate,

9. The assertion that the most useful definition of magic is the one held by thepeople, society, or culture under investigation is a central argument of Kieckehfer,Magic in the Middle Ages, for example, and is a running theme throughout BengtAnkarloo and Stuart Clark, eds., Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, 6 vols. (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999–2002). See also the addendum volume, HelenBerger, ed., Witchcraft and Magic in Contemporary North America (Philadelphia: Univer-sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

10. E.g. David Frankfurter, ‘‘Dynamics of Ritual Expertise in Antiquity and Be-yond: Towards a New Taxonomy of ‘Magicians,’ ’’ in Magic and Ritual in the AncientWorld, ed. Paul Mirecki and Marvin Meyer, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World141 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 159–78; Jan N. Bremmer, ‘‘The Birth of the Term‘Magic,’ ’’ in The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period,ed. Jan N. Bremmer and Jan R. Veenstra, Groningen Studies in Cultural Change 1(Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 1–11. Related studies of religion include Peter Biller,‘‘Words and the Medieval Notion of ‘Religion,’ ’’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36(1985): 351–69; John Van Engen, ‘‘Faith as a Concept of Order in Medieval Chris-tendom,’’ in Belief in History: Innovative Approaches to European and American Religion,ed. Thomas Kselman (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991),19–67. See also Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1998), especially Donald S. Lopez Jr. on ‘‘Belief ’’ (pp.21–35) and Jonathan Z. Smith on ‘‘Religion, Religions, Religious’’ (pp. 269–84);this latter now reprinted in Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study ofReligion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 179–96.


aspects of older grand theories still attract attention and help to give someshape to the subject of magic, and there have emerged from newer ap-proaches definite impulses for the study of magic as a coherent field.11

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The complexities revealed by careful study of specific magical rites and sys-tems pose problems, but also open up many areas of potential scholarly explo-ration, so long as that exploration intends to more fully understand thosecomplexities rather than simply to overcome them. One such area involvesthe revival of nuanced comparativism, aiming to extract both useful similari-ties and important differences from various highly focused studies.12 As schol-ars have increasingly turned to the careful examination of specific magicalbeliefs and systems of practice, they have amply demonstrated how such so-cial and cultural constructions depend on and must be understood withinparticular contexts. Their work, however, has also built up substantial supportfor the basic proposition that, despite important variances, many cultureshave had or have general concepts that largely equate to the Western categoryof magic, considering also that term’s inherent lack of precision. Of course,such apparent similarities arise in part from modern scholars’ inability to fullyescape the shackles of modern and almost inevitably Western concepts andterminology. This is precisely the dilemma that highly focused and carefullycontextualized studies are intended to mitigate, and any attempt to drawgeneral or comparative points from such studies must pay careful attention tohow well they achieve this goal.

Despite issues of terminology and conceptualization, there is abundant evi-dence that most cultures have drawn and continue to draw certain basicdistinctions separating manipulations of spiritual or occult natural powers thatare deemed appropriate and approved from those considered sinister and il-licit. Moreover, these differentiations typically involve far more than simplydistinguishing between good and bad forms of what are otherwise recognizedto be essentially similar practices. Instead, illicit forms are often deemed to

11. The six volumes of Ankarloo and Clark, eds., Witchcraft and Magic in Europe,seek to frame the field for that area of the world. Richard M. Golden, ed., Encyclope-dia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, 4 vols. (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio,2006), is intended as a comprehensive reference work for the field of Europeanwitchcraft studies.

12. The need for comparative scholarship to focus on differences as well as similar-ities in its elucidation of patterns has been stressed by William Paden, ‘‘Elements of aNew Comparativism,’’ Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8 (1996): 5–14.


belong to an entirely different category of action. In medieval Christian Eu-rope, for example, authorities regularly defined magic as drawing on demonicpower, while religious rites, however similar in form or intended outcome,comprised a wholly separate sphere of action because they were believed todraw on divine force.13 Thus tied to Christian demonology, medieval Euro-pean conceptions of magic became inextricably linked to Christian conceptsof heresy, blasphemy, and idolatry, profoundly affecting the ways in whichmedieval authorities responded to supposed magical practices.14

In classical Greece, on the other hand, what modern scholars might labelas either ‘‘religious’’ or ‘‘magical’’ rituals were often conceived as evokingthe same sources of power (frequently spiritual entities called daimones).Within this range of powerful and effective practices, mageia referred quiteprecisely to foreign cultic rites, specifically those of Persian priests or magoi.In its etymological origins, the Western term ‘‘magic’’ was defined first bysimple geography. Because the foreignness of mageia carried dark and sinisterconnotations, the term gradually became extended to include many illicit,covert, or private rites performed by Greeks themselves, but opposed to thepublicly approved civic cults of the Greek poleis. Yet mageia in this sense wasnot simply ‘‘religious’’ ritual transported out of the confines of public cults,for the ancient world knew private cults, particularly familial ones, as well asprophets and priests who operated outside of clear cultic sites. Such peoplemight arouse more suspicion than temple priests, but they were not automat-ically magoi.15

There is no doubt that the ancient pagan and medieval Christian worldsdefined magic quite differently. As Christianity rose to dominance in theworld of late antiquity, conceptions of magic underwent a profound shift

13. Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages; also Richard Kieckhefer, ‘‘The SpecificRationality of Medieval Magic,’’ American Historical Review 99 (1994): 813–36.

14. Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: CornellUniversity Press, 1971); Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspiredby the Great Witch Hunt (New York: Basic Books, 1975), slightly revised and reprintedas Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Edward Peters, The Magician, the Witch, andthe Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978).

15. Fritz Graf, Magic in the Ancient World, trans. Franklin Philip (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1997). See also Georg Luck, ‘‘Witches and Sorcerers inClassical Literature,’’ in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome, ed.Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1999), 91–158, and Richard Gordon, ‘‘Imagining Greek and Roman Magic,’’ inibid., 159–275.


that Valerie Flint has characterized as a ‘‘demonization.’’ Christian thinkerstransformed classical daimones, creatures of often ambivalent morality, intodemons, fallen angels, and servants of the devil who were inherently evil andinimical to humanity.16 Yet although classical and Christian culture had verydifferent ways of separating magical operations from proper religion and cul-tic practices, they each posited such a division, and even described it in someof the same ways. In both pagan antiquity and medieval Christian Europe,the term ‘‘superstition’’ meant excessive or improper devotion or ritual prac-tices. In fact, early Christian authors took the word superstitio directly fromlate-Roman usage. While to the Romans, Christianity was superstitious, inthe Christian context a major element of superstition was the improper per-formance of rituals in honor of demons. This definition encompassed magic,but also the rites of all pagan cults. While this radical redirecting of supersti-tion highlights the opposition between Christian and pagan culture, it alsodemonstrates that both pagan and Christian society, despite their very differ-ent understandings of magic, were similar in their identification of sharplydifferentiated spheres of ritual action.17

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Conceptions of magic, however designated, function broadly in many cul-tures to differentiate certain actions sharply from otherwise potentially quite

16. Valerie Flint, ‘‘The Demonisation of Magic and Sorcery in Late Antiquity:Christian Redefinitions of Pagan Religions,’’ in Ankarloo and Clark, Witchcraft andMagic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome, 277–348. The figure of the devil, presentin early Judaism, became far more clearly articulated as the great oppositional forceto God and enemy of humankind in later apocalyptic Judaism, and especially in earlyChristianity through the writings of the church fathers. See Jeffrey Burton Russell,The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor-nell University Press, 1977), and Russell, Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (Ithaca,N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981). A more focused study is Elaine Pagels, TheOrigin of Satan (New York: Vintage, 1995).

17. Still the best overview of medieval concepts of superstition is Dieter Harmen-ing, Superstitio: Uberlieferungs- und theoriegeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur kirchlich-theologischen Aberglaubensliteratur des Mittelalters (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1979). On an-tiquity, see Dale B. Martin, Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). Specifically on ways the word‘‘superstitio’’ could be used by either Roman or Christian authorities in the late-imperial period, see L. F. Janssen, ‘‘ ‘Superstitio’ and the Persecution of Christians,’’Vigiliae Christianae 33 (1979): 131–59; Michele R. Salzman, ‘‘ ‘Superstitio’ in theCodex Theodosianus and the Persecution of the Pagans,’’ Vigiliae Christianae 41(1987): 172–88.


similar rites, rituals, or practices. Drawing these distinctions is an exercise inpower, and a major area of comparative focus must be to explore what rolessuch differentiation plays in various societies, who controls this differentia-tion, and to what ends that created difference is employed. In many culturesand across various historical periods, categories of magic often define andmaintain the limits of socially and culturally acceptable actions in respect tonuminous or occult entities or forces. Even more basically they serve to de-lineate arenas of appropriate belief. Whether defined as foreign rites, domes-tic but clandestine ones, or private rituals as opposed to public and communalceremonies, magical practices and beliefs comprise a shadowy and tenuous,but still often carefully constructed, realm that helps shape a society’s basicconceptions about both spiritual and natural forces that imbue the world withmeaning. In many cultures individuals do not typically designate themselvesas magicians or practitioners of magic. Those are labels ascribed to them bysociety, or by specific authoritative elites within a society. Such people maynot deny the actions they perform, but they reject the sinister connotations(the means of differentiation) that the various terms that can be understoodas designating ‘‘magic’’ frequently carry. Thus, to be labeled a magician isgenerally an accusation rather than a self-appellation. In fact, systems of magictend to be defined by those who claim not to practice or, especially in themodern world, even to believe in them. While some medieval clerics didengage in ritual magic, for example, most of the theologians who describedand dissected horrific demonic rites during the Middle Ages were nevertempted to try a spell themselves. The anthropologists and sociologists of thelate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who developed the major theo-ries of magic discussed at the beginning this article never believed in magicas its practitioners did, and scholars of contemporary magic continue to facethat issue today.18

Of course, in many contexts people have self-designated as magicians, andcontinue to do so (again, regardless of the actual terminology). Some readilyconfess to magical crimes when questioned by authorities. Others promotetheir image as a practitioner of powerful rites or a possessor of occult knowl-

18. In one of the earliest academic studies of contemporary magic, the anthropol-ogist Tanya Luhrmann was careful to note that although she engaged in magical prac-tices as part of her fieldwork, she did not consider herself a magician or a witch. SeeT. M. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 16–18. Nikki Bado-Fralick,both a scholar and a practitioner, writes at length about the perceived dilemmas ofthis status. See Bado-Fralick, Coming to the Edge of the Circle, 4–21.


edge as a social identity. In Europe during the Middle Ages, educated butoften lowly placed members of the clerical elite deliberately engaged in nec-romancy and other forms of ritual magic, frequently as an avenue to powerin political courts.19 Clerical necromancy continued to be a problem for reli-gious authorities into the period of the Reformation, and of course the Re-naissance was famous for its learned magi who grounded their magical systemsin esoteric Hermeticism or aspects of Neoplatonic thought.20 Whatever theirparticular situation, such people frequently acted to critique or challenge cer-tain systems, structures, or norms within their society. This criticism couldbe tacit; no medieval necromancer ever seems to have openly questioned theauthority of the church to pronounce on the legitimacy of various rites andrituals. Some Renaissance magi, by contrast, directly challenged the churchand asserted the validity of their rites over official religion.

At quite another level from well-educated (and male) necromancers andRenaissance mages, the poor old women suspected of being witches in earlymodern Europe may have embraced that label in order to obtain, at whateverrisk, some level of respect and even dark prestige within a community inwhich otherwise they were relatively powerless. Even if a suspect only beganto confess in the course of a trial or under torture, this need not have repre-sented simple submission to authorities’ accusations. Scholarship on the Eu-ropean witch trials has begun to demonstrate how confessions could articulatedeep psychological anxieties and social tensions that otherwise might not beexpressible in any form.21 Shielded from legal prosecution, although still open

19. On the medieval ‘‘clerical underworld’’ of necromancy, see Kieckhefer, Magicin the Middle Ages, 151–75. On the nexus of magical and political power in a courtly‘‘demimonde,’’ see Peters, The Magician, the Witch, and the Law, 112–25. RichardKieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century (UniversityPark: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), examines one late-medieval necro-mantic text in detail, and positions it in precisely such a courtly demimonde. See alsoJan R. Veenstra, Magic and Divination at the Courts of Burgundy and France: Text andContext of Laurens Pignon’s ‘‘Contra les devineurs’’ (1411) (Leiden: Brill, 1998).

20. William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the BasqueLands to Sicily (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 176–79, notes casesof clerical magic in counter-Reformation Sicily in the sixteenth century. The funda-mental, although overstated, treatment of Renaissance Hermeticism is Frances A.Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1964). Also essential on Renaissance magi is D. P. Walker, Spiritual and DemonicMagic from Ficino to Campanella (1958; reprint University Park: Pennsylvania StateUniversity Press, 2000).

21. See several essays in Lyndal Roper, Oepidus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality,and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1994);Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven, Conn.: Yale


to some level of societal ridicule and even persecution, modern Wiccansquite consciously appropriate the term ‘‘witchcraft,’’ seeking to destabilize itslong-standing negative connotations and especially gendered stereotypes.22

Ongoing debates and contestations over who controls the various appella-tions for ‘‘magicians’’ and what those appellations connote therefore offersanother area of general concern shared by many scholars working in thisfield.

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All the related issues thus far discussed cluster around the central problem ofhow various cultures have understood and employed categories they, or we,call magic. Many insights have been and will continue to be gained by carefulexamination of the precise historicized and contextualized meanings of vari-ous terms and categories roughly translatable as magic. Equally careful com-parisons between these categories, exploring how they function in differentsocieties, will yield further insights in many areas of cultural and social studies.This approach can also become problematic, however, because indigenouscultural understandings of magic and deployment of terms for magic can infact mislead ‘‘external’’ scholars in some important ways. For example, schol-ars studying magic and witchcraft in medieval and early modern Europe usedto stress strong divisions between popular and elite notions of magic. Tosome extent this tendency replicated earlier anthropological distinctionsequating magic with primitivism, as something more advanced societies, andmore elite groups within societies, should have moved beyond.23 Yet as

University Press, 2004). On social systems that promoted accusations and confessions,see Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of EuropeanWitchcraft (New York: Viking, 1996).

22. The neopagan author and journalist Margot Adler, for example, had to addressthe meaning of the term ‘‘witch’’ at the very outset of her account of modern witch-craft Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers and Other PaganPeoples in America Today, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin/Arkana, 1986), 10–11. Theimportant neopagan author Starhawk writes explicitly of ‘‘reclaiming’’ the term inher seminal book The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great God-dess, 20th anniversary ed. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), 31–32. A re-sponsible scholarly account of the origins and early development of modernwitchcraft is Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern PaganWitchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

23. To the work of Frazer and Durkheim mentioned already, add the foundationalanthropological work by Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2 vols. (1871; re-print New York: Harper, 1958), esp. 1:112–59 and to an extent 2:448–60 (onprayer); Lucien Levy-Bruhl, How Native’s Think, trans. Lilian A. Clare (1926; reprintNew York: Washington Square Press, 1966), esp. 256–68; Levy-Bruhl, Primitive Men-


Richard Kieckhefer demonstrated three decades ago, arguments for such dis-tinctions also paid careful attention to how judges, accusers, and the accusedpresented sometimes quite different notions of magical practices, how suchpractices functioned, and what they entailed.24 A strict dichotomy betweenelite and popular conceptions has proven inadequate, however, and has nowlargely been abandoned in favor of further careful study of how understand-ings of magic were distributed across society. Kieckhefer, for example, hasmodified some of his own earlier distinctions between popular and learnedconceptions of magic by suggesting a broad ‘‘common tradition’’ of magicpermeating all levels of medieval society, around which various more particu-lar traditions clustered.25

Following Kieckhefer, other scholars have stressed an expansive spectrumof magical beliefs and practices running both horizontally and vertically acrosspremodern European society. Yet some clear distinctions between elite andpopular concerns evident in most witch trials remains. So too does CarloGinzburg’s remarkable discovery of the extraordinary system of beliefs sur-rounding individuals known as benandanti (literally, well-farers) in the remotenorthern Italian region of Friuli, which proved as surprising to modern schol-ars and it did to early modern Roman inquisitors. Ginzburg ultimately ex-panded his initial study to argue for a deeply rooted and fully popular, indeedfolkloric, stratum of essentially shamanistic practices informing popular Euro-pean images of witchcraft, but utterly closed to authoritative elites.26 As otherscholars have uncovered and explored additional examples of such beliefs,shamanism and remnants of shamanistic beliefs and practices has become an-

tality, trans. Lilian A. Clare (New York: Macmillan, 1923), esp. 35–51, 59–67, 89–96;Levy-Bruhl, Primitives and the Supernatural, trans. Lilian A. Clare (1935; reprint NewYork: Haskell, 1973), esp. 153–96.

24. Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular andLearned Culture, 1300–1500 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of CaliforniaPress, 1976), drew perceptive distinctions based on careful readings of trial recordsthat remain accepted to this day.

25. Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages; also Karen Louise Jolly, ‘‘MedievalMagic: Definitions, Beliefs, Practices,’’ in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The MiddleAges, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (Philadelphia: University of PennsylvaniaPress, 2002), 1–71, esp. 27–58; for a rich study of the complexity of cultural interac-tions in the field of magic, see Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charmsin Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

26. Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth andSeventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-versity Press, 1983); Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Ray-mond Rosenthal (New York: Penguin, 1992).


other facet of the broad ‘‘common magical tradition.’’ In particular, througha case study in every way as remarkable as Ginzburg’s own find in Friuli,Wolfgang Behringer has repositioned the shamanism paradigm in relation tobeliefs about the afterlife and the complex restructuring of folk-culture dur-ing the Reformation. As his and other work suggests, some aspects of the oldpoplar/elite distinction remain both viable and useful.27

While a focus on specific and at first glance possibly peculiar subtraditionsof belief can therefore open larger vistas, working at the other end of Italyfrom the region of Ginzburg’s benandanti, and following a very differentmethodology, David Gentilcore has sought to explore how people at all levelsof early modern European society were, in practice, little confined by any setnotions of magic or religion. Concerned less with methods than with theparticular results they sought to achieve, they moved easily from ‘‘magical’’rites to ‘‘religious’’ ones and back again. Finding even an extended commonmagical tradition too limiting to describe such behavior, Gentilcore arguedinstead for a very inclusive ‘‘system of the sacred’’ extending from simplewitches to priests and bishops.28 Evocative and useful as his term is, however,it risks losing the critical distinction that contemporaries at both elite andpopular levels of society commonly understood to lie between magical andreligious power in premodern, Christian Europe.29

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Perhaps the most important area in which broadly theoretical and often com-parative work dealing with magic remains a vital element of scholarship, inaddition to focused studies, involves the complex interaction of magic withmodernity. As scholars in many disciplines turn more attention to non-

27. E.g. Gabor Klaniczay, ‘‘Shamanistic Elements of Central European Witch-craft,’’ in his The Uses of Supernatural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion inMedieval and Early-Modern Europe, trans. Susan Singerman, ed. Karen Margolis(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 129–50; Wolfgang Behringer,Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night, trans. H. C.Erik Midelfort (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998); Eva Pocs, Betweenthe Living and the Dead: A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age, trans.Szilvia Redey and Michael Webb (Budapest: Central European University Press,1999).

28. Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terrad’Otranto (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992).

29. As stressed in Kieckhefer, ‘‘Specific Rationality.’’ He was responding here notto Gentilcore but to Valerie I. J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).


Western cultures, particularly in such fields as colonial, postcolonial, and sub-altern studies, magic has become an important category to understand andevaluate Western culture’s interaction with and impact on the rest of theworld. Historians and anthropologists have begun to untangle the ways inwhich Europe exported its particular conceptions of magic and witchcraft, aswell as the effects this exportation has had. Colonial authorities used theseconceptions to categorize and control native peoples, yet such concepts haveremained dynamic or even taken on new dynamism in the postcolonial pe-riod as native populations now seek to reassert traditional beliefs and prac-tices, yet also necessarily strive to integrate these traditions with systems ofWestern modernity.30 Such efforts have reflected back on Europe itself, andscholars are beginning to reconsider more seriously how basic elements ofmodern European thought and belief have been historically and culturallyconstructed, and to what effect on Europe and the rest of the world.

Major efforts have been made to trace the evolution of the modern cate-gory ‘‘magic,’’ particularly since the period of the Protestant Reformation,and to uncover how, in Europe as well as in non-Western colonies, authori-ties have employed that category to distinguish the modern from the primi-tive or archaic.31 A defining feature of Western culture at least since theEnlightenment of the eighteenth century and to some degree since the Ref-ormation of the sixteenth has been ‘‘disenchantment’’—the rejection, at leastby authoritative elites, of many forms of magic, occult properties, or spiritualactivity, or anything (including even elements of official religion) that mightbe dismissed as superstition. Despite the severity of the modern Western dis-missal of supernatural powers operating in the world, however, many scholars

30. A good introduction would be Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels, eds., Magic andModernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UniversityPress, 2003). Other examples include Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft:Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa, trans. Peter Geschiere and Janet Roitman(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997); Henrietta L. Moore and ToddSanders, eds., Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft, and theOccult in Postcolonial Africa (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); Raquel Rom-berg, Witchcraft and Welfare: Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern PuertoRico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). On deployment of ideas of magic andwitchcraft during colonial regimes, see (again examples only) Irene Silverblatt, Moon,Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 1987); Margaret J. Wiener, Visible and Invisible Realism:Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1995); Laura A. Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft and Caste in Colonial Mexico(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).

31. Most recently and profoundly Styers, Making Magic.


of modern Europe are now coming to argue that even in the West, magichas never disappeared as a serious and important cultural category, and thatmagical beliefs and practices remain integral to at least certain aspects of West-ern modernity.32

That European society moved along a historical trajectory toward officialrejection of many magical practices and that disenchantment characterizesmany aspects of the modern West are venerable suggestions, deriving fromthe early-twentieth-century work of Max Weber, who associated the ‘‘disen-chantment of the [Western] world’’ (Entzauberung der Welt) primarily withthe Protestant Reformation, and above all with the rise of ascetic Calvinism.33

Weber’s ideas have encountered a good deal of criticism and revision in thecentury since he first articulated them, and historians of European magic andwitchcraft in particular have rejected his claim that any serious disenchant-ment marked the Reformation era, when Europe experienced its major witchhunts. Instead they have pushed the real diminution in magical beliefs andpractices back to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment or to nineteenth-and even twentieth-century industrialization.34 Nevertheless, few would

32. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of theModern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Corinna Treitel, A Science forthe Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 2004); David Allen Harvey, Beyond Enlightenment: Occultism and Poli-tics in Modern France (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005). These all dealwith specifically modern forms of magic and occultism; on the continuation of earliertraditions see Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic, and Culture 1736–1951 (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1999), and Willem de Blecourt and Owen Davies, eds.,Witchcraft Continued: Popular Magic in Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester Uni-versity Press, 2004). On magical and occult practices during the Enlightenment itself,see Owen Davies and Willem de Blecourt, eds., Beyond the Witch Trials: Witchcraft andMagic in Enlightenment Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), andH. C. Erik Midelfort, Exorcism and Enlightenment: Johann Joseph Gassner and the Demonsof Eighteenth-Century Germany (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005). Foran important statement on the degree to which the Enlightenment actually opposedmagical and spiritual systems, see Martin Pott, Aufklarung und Aberglaube: Die deutscheFruhaufklarung im Spiegel ihrer Aberglaubenskritik (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1992).

33. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons(1930; reprint London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 56–80

34. For a general critique, see Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the EuropeanMind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 258;more specifically see R. W. Scribner, ‘‘The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the‘Disenchantment of the World,’ ’’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1993): 475–94,reprinted in Scribner, Religion and Culture in Germany (1400–1800), ed. Lyndal Roper(Leiden: Brill, 2001), 346–65.


deny that since the Enlightenment, modern Western societies have been sig-nificantly disenchanted, although endless debate persists about what exactlythat term implies. While Western culture exports disenchantment as an essen-tial feature of modernity, and other cultures both adapt to and contest thisconnection, the significance of this issue will only grow, making it anothertopic on which a broad conversation could profitably develop between stu-dents of magic working in widely disparate areas. Insofar as scholars identifydisenchantment as a historical process yet have reached no final consensusabout when it primarily occurred, room for debate exists among experts inalmost any historical period.35 Similarly, as disenchantment is a particularlyEuropean idea, framed within European categories of magic and religion(and to some extent science), which now shapes understandings of magical/religious systems around the globe, scholars working on almost any worldculture might profitably join this discussion.

Linked to issues of disenchantment and the separation imposed by an in-creasingly disenchanted West between intangible belief and the manifest en-actment of various rites, another quite specific yet important area emerges inwhich more generalized discussions of magic might prove useful. In Euro-pean society, beginning already in the later Middle Ages and early modernperiod, Christianity largely separated ‘‘religious’’ elements of belief and con-templation from the physical performance of ritualized actions. While manyrites were maintained, particularly by the Catholic Church, their centralitywas downplayed, and many authorities, particularly Protestant ones, came tosee elements of magic in many ritualized performances.36 Similar dynamicsmay or may not be present in other cultures, but European and Americanacademics long accepted the historically particular Western notions of magicand religion as normative, whether they studied the Western or non-Westernworld.37 As with disenchantment, therefore, because these categories have

35. I have recently made an effort to dislodge disenchantment in European historyfrom an entirely post-Reformation context by suggesting that elements of disenchant-ment can be found in medieval, indeed in basic Christian, conceptions of magicaloperation: Bailey, ‘‘The Disenchantment of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstitionin Early European Witchcraft Literature,’’ American Historical Review III (2006):383–404.

36. The classic account of this process, focusing on Protestant England, remainsKeith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribners, 1971).

37. Not focused on magic or religion, but addressing many complexities of theperceived normative status of Europe is Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UniversityPress, 2000).


been exported beyond the West, here too a specific Western developmenthas taken on wider importance, in both the degree to which it has pervadedthe rest of the world and the degree to which it is resisted or contested inother world cultures.

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The separation of essential religious belief from physical enactment in ritualforms tends to occlude the importance of physical objects and above all thehuman body in rites and ceremonies. The category of magic has not sufferedany such imposed separation between its supposed essence and its enactment,yet magic too is far more often studied in terms of how it is understood andreacted to, mostly through prohibitions, than in terms of how it is enacted.In other areas of scholarship within many disciplines, the body has come tobe an important topic of analysis, as physical entity, as cultural construction,and as symbol laden with meaning. The body has been studied as a locusof gender and sexuality, either their expression or their repression.38 Theanthropologist Mary Douglas has discussed the body as a central social sym-bol; the medieval historian Caroline Walker Bynum has done much to reas-sert the central importance of the body in religion, identifying in its basicbiological processes—either the consumption and production of food or evenmore essentially growth and decay—an important locus of human interactionwith the divine and of individual salvation.39 One might extend this insightto include the possibility of the body as locus of interaction with all varietyof supernatural or spiritual forces, or natural but occult ones—in other words,the body as critical interface for ‘‘magic.’’ Such an approach would focusattention on the role of the body in any number of ritual performances oracts, both those that might be labeled religious and those that might be la-beled magical. It would, in fact, necessarily blur the traditional distinctionbetween religion and magic, at least as constructed in the West since the

38. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation inEarly Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Thomas Laqueur,Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1990).

39. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1970; reprint Lon-don and New York: Routledge, 1996). Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and HolyFast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press, 1987); Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essayson Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992);and Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York:Columbia University Press, 1995).


medieval period. How various cultures, societies, or groups perceive bodyfunctioning in and being affected by ritual could be an important way forscholars of magic to analyze their subjects.40

As with human bodies, little comparative work has been done on howphysical objects function in magical rituals or otherwise-designated rites ofpower. Yet the association of amulets, talismans, wands, and other objectswith the invocation, attraction, or repulsion of spiritual or occult naturalforces is widespread, if not universal. How is it that various cultures identifyor fashion such objects, linking them with preternatural power? And howare such items then employed in ritualized practices? Without retreating to aFrazerian category and describing all magical operations as being essentiallysympathetic,41 the basic notion that objects made to resemble certain peopleor things, or symbolically linked to them, might convey power to their pos-sessor is evident in many widely separate contexts. Scholars of classical antiq-uity, for example, expressly write of ‘‘voodoo dolls’’ in ancient Greece,averring any direct comparison but still implicitly conflating such classicalmagic with practices common in the Caribbean two and a half millennialater.42 Admittedly, comparisons pursued along these or similar lines couldeasily become simplistic or essentialist. Yet scholarship should not avoid areasof inquiry because of potential anachronisms.

Beyond an examination of the social and cultural roles specially designatedobjects of power might play, which would be the domain primarily of histo-rians and anthropologists, greater attention to how social and cultural mean-ing and power were (sometimes literally) inscribed in objects would bring arthistorians more fully into scholarly dialogue about magic. Magical items andvisual depictions of magical practices have too rarely been explored as artistic

40. My initial thoughts on this subject derive from conversations with my col-league Nikki Bado-Fralick about the role of body and practice, as opposed to belief,in religion. See Bado-Fralick, Coming to the Edge of the Circle, 78–80, 102–4, 129–34.More generally on the significance of ritual as physically enacted performance Cather-ine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997),74, where she notes: ‘‘Some theorists appeal to kinesthesia, the sensations experiencedby the body in movement, while others appeal to synesthesia, the evocation of a total,unified, and overwhelming sensory experience’’ in their attempts to unravel ‘‘thedistinctive physical reality of ritual so easily overlooked by more intellectual ap-proaches.’’ Body, however, is not a major element of Bell’s treatment of ritual.

41. Frazer, Golden Bough, 1:52–54.42. Graf, Magic in the Ancient World, 136–46. Graf is careful to criticize simple

Frazerian notions of sympathetic magic (p. 145). See also Daniel Ogden, ‘‘BindingSpells: Curse Tablets and Voodoo Dolls in the Greek and Roman Worlds,’’ in Ankar-loo and Clark, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome, 1–90, at 71–79.


creations. In a recent work on several centuries’ worth of visual images ofEuropean witches, Linda Hults has argued convincingly that such depictionsdid not simply reproduce contemporary understandings of witchcraft as de-veloped in legal or theological texts. Rather, artists crafted images of witchesand their magical acts that satisfied various artistic dynamics operating in earlymodern European culture.43 Both focused and broader cross-cultural studiesof how the magical is depicted (and why it is depicted in certain ways) seema scholarly desideratum.

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With witchcraft, as with magic and ritual generally, responsible scholarshipmust address the cultural specificity of the concept being employed, and thelimits of that specificity.44 Highly focused studies offer the advantage of beingable to define carefully the ideas deployed. Witchcraft is generally taken tomean harmful magic performed by people of low social status. It is typicallynot a learned craft involving long study or highly developed ritual expertise.It often carries the implication of close alliance with or worship of evil super-natural entities. Its practitioners are more often women then men, althoughnot necessarily so.45 Understood in this way, witchcraft is a phenomenon orconstruction that has appeared in many cultures. In late-medieval and earlymodern Europe, however, authorities came to consider the practitioners ofsuch magic to be members of large, organized, explicitly diabolical cults.Witches offered service and worship to the Christian devil, and often explic-itly exchanged their souls for the ability to command demons and so performmagical acts. In this context, witchcraft represented the culmination of centu-

43. Hults, The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe (Phila-delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). In regard to my own area of chro-nological focus, I am reminded of the late art historian Michael Camille’s complaintthat art history was too often regarded as merely ‘‘supplementary’’ to medieval stud-ies: Camille, ‘‘Art History in the Past and Future of Medieval Studies,’’ in The Pastand Future of Medieval Studies, ed. John Van Engen (Notre Dame: Ind.: University ofNotre Dame Press, 1994), 362–82. Numerous articles on witchcraft and art byCharles Zika are collected in Zika, Exorcising our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft and VisualCulture in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2003).

44. That ‘‘ritual’’ too, at least in intellectual and academic usage, is a problematicconstruction of the post-Reformation West rooted, above all, in Reformation-eratheology, see Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts andSocial Scientific Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 161–247.

45. Devotees of neopagan Wicca, who often identify their practices as witchcraft,would certainly object to all but (perhaps) the last of these definitions. Modern neopa-gan witches, however, employ the term in a historically nontraditional way.


ries of linkage drawn by Christian authorities between the performance ofmagic and demonic forces. Some scholars contend that this conception ofharmful magic and society’s response to it (i.e., witch trials and the majorwitch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) were so deeply en-meshed with Western Christian theology and with Western European religi-osity of this period that they comprise a unique historical phenomenon. Byimplication, few worthwhile comparisons can be drawn between Europeanwitchcraft and systems of harmful magic in other cultures.46

There are deep historiographical reasons for this tendency to regard Euro-pean witchcraft as exceptional. The founding fathers of the modern historicalstudy of the European witch hunts, men like Henry Charles Lea and JosephHansen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had inherited anessentially Enlightenment mentality that regarded the medieval church as abastion of superstition and intolerance. They tended to emphasize thedemonological elements of the witch-stereotype—worship of demons andthe devil, membership in cults, and participation in horrific witches’ sabbathswhere, typically, witches renounced God, trampled on the cross, and dese-crated the Eucharist. They attributed the impulse to construct witches in thisway primarily to medieval clerical authorities, above all inquisitors who drewon only slightly less fanciful notions of medieval heretical cults and theirsupposed demonic gatherings.47 In the later twentieth century, scholars began

46. The standard English-language survey of early modern witchcraft, Brian P.Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1995),4–9, distinguishes the elements of maleficium in the European conception of witch-craft from elements of diabolism. He states that ‘‘it was in the performance of maleficiathat European witchcraft most closely resembled the practice of witchcraft in primi-tive and non-European societies today’’ (p. 4), while ‘‘it is the diabolical componentof early modern European witchcraft that distinguishes it most clearly from the witch-craft of many primitive societies in the world today’’ (p. 9). Levack is of coursecorrect that there were many unique elements in European witchcraft, just as thereare in any specific system of beliefs. Moreover, he is certainly not averse to compara-tive scholarship. He has edited two multivolume collections of scholarly articles onwitchcraft. In the first, he included a full volume of comparative anthropologicalstudies (Brian P. Levack, ed., Articles on Witchcraft, Magic, and Demonology, 12 vols.[New York: Garland, 1992], vol. 1, Anthropological Studies of Witchcraft, Magic, andReligion). In the second, he included several articles on African witchcraft in the vol-ume on modern witchcraft (Levack, ed., New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic, andDemonology, 6 vols. [New York: Routledge, 2001], vol. 6, Witchcraft in the ModernWorld, 342–448).

47. Joseph Hansen, Zauberwahn, Inquisition und Hexenprozess im Mittelalter, und dieEntstehung der grossen Hexenverfolgung (1900; reprint Aalen: Scientia, 1964); Hansen,ed., Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung


to approach the study of European witchcraft from the perspective of socialhistory, seeking to understand witchcraft not as the imposed construct ofmaniacal religious elites but as a sensible and even useful social structure. Inthis effort, historians such as Alan Macfarlane and Keith Thomas, while fo-cusing their own studies mainly or entirely on early modern England, weredeeply influenced by earlier anthropological work done on African socie-ties.48 Yet this influence did not move European scholarship on witchcraftor witch-hunting in any strongly comparative direction. Rather, historianscontinued to emphasize the particularly Christian nature of witchcraft, andthe particular Western European political, social, and intellectual structuresand developments that promoted fear and prosecution of witches.49

Such studies are important and of course correct in their basic assumptionthat witchcraft needs to be situated in particular social and cultural milieus,and certainly the ways in which particular societies conceived and employedwitchcraft as a category of magical action must be analyzed and understood.Yet scholars have now also begun to emphasize how much European witch-craft, even with all of its demonological elements appended by authorities,remained primarily about the performance of simple, harmful magic—maleficium in medieval and early modern legal parlance.50 Combining aspectsof this approach with evidence of significant revivals of legal prosecution forthe supposed practice of malevolent magic mainly in regions of Africa, Wolf-gang Behringer, a leading expert on early modern European witchcraft, hascalled for scholars to reconsider the basic ways they have defined witchcraft.He notes that fear of harmful magic has been prevalent in most historicalcultures, and that it continues to exist in many cultures, including (albeitin significantly reduced form) Western European culture. While suspicions

im Mittelalter (1901; reprint Hildesheim; Georg Olms, 1963); Henry Charles Lea, AHistory of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, 3 vols. (New York: Harper, 1888), 3:492–549; Lea, Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft, ed. Arthur C. Howland, 3 vols.(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1939).

48. Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and ComparativeStudy (New York: Harper and Row, 1970); Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic.Both were influenced especially by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magicamong the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon, 1937).

49. For example, Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in EarlyModern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), demonstrates magisteriallyhow deeply embedded the European witch-stereotype was in many areas of intellec-tual activity, by no means exclusively ‘‘religious’’ thought.

50. Briggs, Witches and Neighbors, aggressively asserts that simple acts of maleficium,not demonology or even the mechanics of major witch hunts, should be the basis forthe historical study of European witchcraft.


concerning the sort of person who supposedly engages in harmful magic canbe quite diverse, Behringer notes a widespread tendency to attribute at leastcertain types of harmful magic to people believed to be deeply involved withsinister spiritual forces. Such conceptions of evil magical practitioners seemto engender, or at least reveal, certain basic and similar fears in many societies.Social and legal response to such suspected magicians frequently takes theform of sporadic waves of serious repression and prosecution—in other words,hunts. Those suspected of these crimes are often conceived as operating inconspiratorial groups, and they are often considered more likely to be womenthan men. For all these reasons, Behringer suggests, it is appropriate for schol-ars to label them as witches and the actions they supposedly engage in aswitchcraft.51

While recognizing the continued necessity of highly focused studies ofwitchcraft in particular social, cultural, and historical settings,52 Behringerintends more than simply to suggest that responsible comparative studiesmay also be possible and profitable. He insists on the need for such studiesand on the more expansive definition of witchcraft that they entail. So longas witchcraft remains linked to medieval and early modern Western Christiandemonology, he contends, it will remain an essentially Eurocentric notioninapplicable to the present age when activities that Behringer persuasivelylabels as witch hunts are prevalent and actually increasing in many regions ofAfrica and other parts of the world. More generally, the underlying notionthat witchcraft and witch-hunting represent a terrible but essentially com-pleted chapter in human history—itself a Eurocentric concept derived fromEnlightenment authorities’ confidence in their ability to promote disenchant-ment—must be challenged not just in Africanist or Asianist scholarship, reas-sessed not merely by postcolonial studies or by subaltern studies, but rathermust be a focus of genuinely ecumenical scholarship on this topic.53

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So with witchcraft, as with magic as a whole, there is a need for discussionand debate about terms employed, limits imposed, and the basic possibilitiesof scholarly inquiry. There is and probably can be no simple methodological

51. Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History (Cambridge: Polity,2004).

52. Behringer’s own Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zeal-otry and Reason of State in Early Modern Europe, trans. J. C. Grayson and David Lederer(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), is an excellent regional study.

53. Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts, 1–10.


solution to the definition or study of magic. A clear understanding of theterminology employed to designate magical acts in any particular context iscritical, but a strict adherence to that terminology or even the basic distinc-tions it draws upon will not be suitable to all scholarly purposes. Moreover,terminology for and concepts of magic are almost universally vague, mutable,and ‘‘occult’’ in the literal sense of hidden or obscured. This basic method-ological problem, however, is itself an element that all scholars working inthe many fields bearing on magic, magical rituals, and witchcraft have incommon. Obvious benefits, if most likely never any definitive solutions, willaccrue from broad discussion of these issues, as well as from close comparisonof different studies focused on different cultures and historical eras that dealwith them.

There are vital reasons for scholars engaged in focused studies to pay atten-tion to each other’s work, and there are calls to attempt comparative ortheoretical work based on focused studies. Categories constructed in the Westdominate and indeed still define the field, but scholars of Western culturecontinue to evaluate the historical development and contingency of thosecategories, and scholarship is becoming increasingly concerned with howthose categories have been imposed, accepted, and negotiated elsewhere inthe world. Those stories, too, have now become critical in understanding thedevelopment of this field. The goal should not be to revise and reassert grandtheories and sweeping definitions of magic such as those that dominated late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century sociology and anthropology, andthen to test the degree to which magic thus understood appears in any givensociety or culture. Rather the goal should be to understand more completelyhow human societies and cultures have conceived, constructed, and reactedto magic and other comparable categories, and to develop and debate vigor-ously the ways in which such comparisons may be possible and profitable.Multiple meanings attach to the categories of magic, rituals and rites ofpower, and witchcraft. Scholars need to be open and alert to them all.

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The Meanings Of Magic - Magic, Ritual, And Witchcraft